Free template

The health and safety pack for veterinary practices

Generic health and safety templates assume an office. They ask about display screens and trailing cables, and they have nothing to say about anaesthetic gases, a kick from a horse, a needlestick at 2am or a client who has become abusive at reception.

Editable Word document, free, emailed to you.

What is in it

• General risk assessment template, with a prompt list of the hazards a practice actually has rather than the ones a generic form expects.
• Manual handling assessment, built round the lift practices get wrong.
• Sharps and needlestick procedure, written to be pinned up where sharps are used.
• Sharps injury record, including the RIDDOR question.
• Accident and near miss report form, which also captures aggression from clients.
• Health and safety induction record, thirteen items to cover before somebody’s first shift.

What this pack is not

It is not a substitute for specialist advice on radiation, controlled drugs or anaesthetic gas monitoring. Where your practice has a Radiation Protection Adviser, their guidance takes precedence over anything in here, and we say so on the first page.

What it does cover is the HR side of health and safety: the assessments, the records, the induction and the reporting that a practice manager is responsible for and that nobody else is going to write.

The manual handling rule that actually works

The most common serious manual handling incident in a practice is a two person lift attempted by one person, because the second person was busy and the animal was already sedated.

The control for that is not a lifting technique. It is a rule that the lift waits, and a culture where waiting is not treated as being slow. The assessment in this pack has a line for exactly that: who must not perform this task alone.

Near misses are the free version of the lesson

A practice that only records injuries is only learning the expensive way. The report form treats a near miss with the same seriousness as an accident, because the near miss is the one that tells you something before anybody is hurt.

It also captures aggression from clients, deliberately. From 30 October 2026 you must take all reasonable steps to prevent third party harassment of your staff, and an incident log showing that reports were made and acted on is part of the evidence that you did.

Use it with our guides to incident reporting and needlestick injuries, and with the lone working policy for staff working alone.